用于自监督表征学习的教师学生互补掩码自动编码器

Teacher-student complementary mask autoencoder for self-supervised representation learning

摘要:

针对自监督表征学习中掩码图像建模(MIM)方法存在上下游任务不匹配的问题,提出了一种称为教师学生互补掩码自动编码器的新预训练模型,即TSCAE模型。该模型由具备互补掩码机制的教师模块和学生模块组成,其中教师模块基于Transformer结构,负责预测图像中掩码区域（如随机掩蔽输入图片的75%部分）；学生模块则采用单一的编码器结构预测同一图像中剩余区域（如掩蔽输入图片余下的25%部分）。为从大量无标签数据中预训练出更丰富的视觉表征,TSCAE模型同时完成两类上游任务,分别是预测任务和对比任务,并在COCO和Tiny-ImageNet数据集上完成预训练。测试结果表明,在包括VOC在内的3个公有数据集和2个私有数据集上,TSCAE在图像分类、目标检测和语义分割等下游任务中,性能均优于经典的掩码自编码器(MAE)。特别地,TSCAE还在一定程度上缓解了预训练图像质量对视觉表征学习编码器的影响。

Abstract:

To address the problem of mismatch between upstream and downstream tasks exhibited by masked image modeling (MIM) methods in self-supervised representation learning, we proposed a novel pre-training model, called teacher-student complementary masked autoencoder, or in other words, the TSCAE model. The TSCAE model consists of two modules with complementary masked mechanisms, called teacher module and student module, respectively. The teacher module was designed as a Transformer-based structure to predict the masked region of an image (e.g., randomly masking 75% of the input image), while the student module employed a sole encoder to predict the remaining region of the same image (e.g., masking the remaining 25% of the input image). Meanwhile, to attain a richer visual representation from a large number of unlabeled data, the TSCAE model completed two kinds of upstream tasks, namely prediction and contrastive tasks. After that, the TSCAE model achieved the pre-training on COCO and Tiny-ImageNet datasets. The results demonstrate that across three public datasets including VOC and two private datasets, the proposed TSCAE model achieves better performance than the classical masked autoencoder (MAE) methods on downstream tasks such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. In particular, the TSCAE also alleviates the impact of the quality of the pre-training images on the visual representation learning encoder to a certain extent.